Burning at the Boss (A Johnny Ravine Mystery)

by Martin Roth

  I tried Joy House in Malaysia and heard the same. At His House Children’s Village in Thailand a man with little English managed to tell me that they had been nearly forced to close when the pastor’s money diminished to a trickle.

  I heard Jonah in the kitchen. I walked in. He was pouring himself a glass of orange juice.

  “Enough left for me?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “Yeah, there’s heaps. There’s more in the fridge.” He handed me the bottle.

  “Where does your mum keep the cups?” I enquired, although I knew exactly where they were.

  “There are some up there, in the cupboard over the sink.” He pointed. “And some more in the cupboard next to the fridge.”

  I took a glass and poured myself some juice. Jonah was clearly torn between his desire to get back to his game and a commendable sense of duty to a visitor in his home. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that he was just a little too polite, a little too dutiful. He was soft. He needed a man in the house. “Do you have a cricket game this Saturday?”

  “Yes.” He took a swig of juice.

  “How’s your team going?”

  “We’re coming second in our competition.”

  “What’s your specialty?”

  “I’m a spin bowler.”

  “A spin bowler. That’s great.” I decided not pursue the matter. I was getting out of my depth. I knew little about cricket. I walked into the living room. Jonah followed and sat back down in front of the television. He now looked more comfortable. “Did you know I’m from East Timor?”

  “Yes, Mum told me.”

  “Do you know much about East Timor?”

  “Not really. Mum said you had a lot of fighting.” He picked up his game controller, certainly eager to be back fighting monsters or criminals or whatever.

  “You know, I never knew my dad. He just disappeared.”

  He said nothing. I doubted that I was really making a connection.

  “And then my mum got killed,” I continued. “A bit like your grandfather.”

  He looked at me politely, no doubt wondering why I kept bothering him.

  “My wife was killed too. In the fighting.”

  He was now back playing again. But then, without looking up, he asked: “Did you love her?”

  What a strange question. Who knows what’s going through the minds of kids? I had to think about my answer. “I loved her. Yes, in my own way I loved her very much. I don’t think I’ve ever loved a woman as much as I loved her.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Learn anything?” asked Miriam, as I helped carry in her groceries. “I still don’t believe this. I think I was walking around the supermarket in a bit of a daze. Somehow I’m more shocked than when the police came to school to tell me about him being dead. Possibly more upset, too. It’s awful.”

  I told her the results of my phone calls. “I find it all hard to believe, too. I never met your father, but…well, from everything you’ve told me about him it’s just impossible to believe that he was stealing money. Not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. For a couple of decades, it seems. What on earth was he spending it on?”

  “So what’s the explanation?”

  “Exactly. What’s the explanation? Clearly he was diverting the money. For some other purpose. But what?”

  “That financial firm, Go-Go Greene Financial, they must be connected. Why was he attacking them? Johnny, I’d completely forgotten. You were going to see them yesterday. What happened?”

  In the drama of learning about the emails from the orphanages I too had forgotten to report to Miriam the results of my meeting the previous day. “I didn’t learn a lot, I’m afraid. Their boss, it seems his name is really Go-Go Greene. Do you know him?”

  “No, I just know the name of his company. But I think some of the teachers at school know him. They’ve been using him to help sort out their superannuation. Stuff like that.”

  “All I learned, other than the fact that Mr Greene is a creep, was that your father had an account there.”

  “Dad? You have to be joking. An account with a financial firm?”

  “Well…” I tried to remember Greene’s exact words. “He said your father was a client. That means he had an account.”

  “I’ve said to you already that Dad knew nothing about investing money. He never had any. He never had superannuation or anything like that. He always said God would provide.”

  Immediately the words of my own pastor sprang to mind—that Pastor Reezall was a hothead who may have thought God wasn’t acting fast enough.

  “Maybe as your father got older he became a little worried that God wasn’t really going to provide,” I said cautiously. “Maybe he decided he’d better put aside a little in case he had an urgent need.” I left unspoken my other sudden thought—that perhaps the murdered pastor had always assumed that his obedient daughter Miriam would take care of him in old age, but that this notion had been shattered by their estrangement.

  “But he was getting so much money. I keep harping on this—maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year. I just don’t believe…” She looked on the verge of tears.

  “Your father’s house,” I said. “We were there only briefly on Tuesday. Before we got chased away. Let’s go back now and see if we can find something. I can’t believe that everything was destroyed. There may be a few papers in the rubble.”

  “Won’t the police still be there?”

  “I doubt it. Though I must admit that they’ll have gone through the place pretty thoroughly. This is a murder investigation.”

  She seemed to be pondering this. “There’s not much else to go on, is there?”

  I wished that I could pretend I had lots of leads. But I couldn’t lie. “Get Jonah and we’ll drive over now,” I said.

  Once I started up the car Boss Radio began immediately playing some hard rock. Then an announcer, who sounded as if she was about sixteen years old, reminded us that today was another day of total fire ban.

  “I don’t know anyone who listens to that station,” said Miriam. “I only listened because my father was on. I don’t think I even knew it existed before that.”

  “I thought everyone listened in summer for the fire warnings.”

  “Yes, they’re always telling us that in summer we should be listening to our local radio stations to get the latest fire warnings. But everyone I know tunes into 3AW or the ABC or something. And more and more it’s on the internet, or SMS or whatever.”

  I changed the subject. “I saw that Boss Radio guy again last night. Rad what’s-his-name. In Your Face Radio. He said all the talk around town is of Go-Go Greene and carbon offsets.”

  “Carbon offsets?”

  “Do you know what they are?”

  “Yes. Well, I think so. I’ve heard some of the teachers at school talking about them. It’s, kind of, I think it’s a way of paying for the pollution, the carbon, that you emit. You know, when you drive anywhere, or when you take an air flight. To compensate for that you pay someone who is doing something that reduces pollution. You offset it.”

  “Full marks. Ten out of ten. That seems to accord with what I learned on the internet last night. Do you know anyone who’s involved with them?”

  She thought. “Maybe some people at school. But I’m really not sure. I know I’ve heard teachers talking about it in the staff room.”

  “In connection with Go-Go Greene?”

  Again she was silent. Then: “Johnny, I’m sorry, but I’m really not sure.”

  “It’s okay. I’m still not sure how important it is.”

  We came to the turn-off that led to the pastor’s house.

  “Will the road be blocked again?” asked Miriam.

  “No. They can’t block a road for a couple of days just because of a fire. Only if there’s some sort of danger.”

  This time we could proceed straight to the house without hindrance. We drove down the pastor’s driveway and confronted a burnt-out car
that I hadn’t spotted on our first visit.

  “Even his car is gone,” said Miriam. “I think that car deserves a memorial service of its own. It was ancient. I can’t think how many hundreds of thousands of miles it must have done. It was old when I was working with him eleven years ago.”

  We got out of our car, and I saw Jonah staring at the scene.

  “Has he been here before?” I asked Miriam.

  “Oh yes. Of course. My father wasn’t totally heartless. I hope I didn’t make him out to be a monster. We came here together a few times. Maybe half-a-dozen times in the five years that he’d been living here.” She paused. “A half-a-dozen times in five years. That’s all. That was pretty heartless, wasn’t it? Your own grandson.”

  I pointed at the ruins. “That’s what fire can do.” Jonah looked up at me politely, but said nothing.

  We circled the rubble. It seemed little had changed from our initial visit two days earlier. Sheets of corrugated iron stuck out at various angles. A smell of smoke still pervaded the air. The heat from the sun was as intense as it had been previously.

  In fact, this visit just seemed to confirm what we had learned before. That the fire was so savage it had destroyed everything. Nothing remained, no furniture, no household items, no charred books, nothing.

  “The police will have taken away anything they found,” I said. “But it doesn’t look as if they’ve disturbed the place much. They might not even have been back since Monday morning. We need to shift some of this rubble.”

  I wished I’d brought some heavy gloves. I also felt that, as we lacked sunhats, our stay here was going to be brief.

  “I’m not even sure what we are looking for,” said Miriam.

  I shrugged. “Anything. But really what we want are documents. Something that explains what he was doing with his money. Or letters, say, that might give a hint as to what’s going on and who killed him. Though documents are the first things that will have been burned.”

  I walked into the center of the house, through the pathway that I assumed had been cleared by the investigating officers two days earlier. Miriam and Jonah followed.

  But it was of course absolutely hopeless. Apart from the sheets of corrugated iron, the bathtub and the chimney, all that appeared to remain was ash. I reflected that if we could gather and sift through all this ash we would no doubt find all kinds of metal items that survived the inferno, but surely nothing that would help us. Though Jonah, good lad, was down on his knees searching for evidence among the piles of soot.

  “Did he have a safe of any kind?” I asked. I noticed that already Miriam’s face was damp.

  “A safe? What for?”

  “I know you said he didn’t own much, but he still had all this money arriving to his charities.”

  “But that all went directly to the bank. Or arrived at his post office box.”

  “Nothing came to his home?”

  “Who’d know his address? No one.”

  I scanned the scene again, this time with a little desperation. This visit was a failure, a complete waste of time. And it was my idea.

  Suddenly, behind me, I heard Miriam cry: “Johnny!” I turned around. “Johnny, I remember. He did have a secret place. On one of my rare visits here he told me that often he visited churches on Sundays to promote his charities, and there were times when he would come away with donations of thousands of dollars in cash.”

  “So he had a safe of some kind?”

  “Not a safe. Just a secret place to store the money until he could get it to the bank. Somewhere no robber would find. He even showed it to me.”

  She looked around the rubble as if suddenly unsure.

  “You do remember?”

  “It was the bathtub,” she said. “Under it.”

  “Under it?”

  “Look.” She pointed at the blackened tub. “It’s one of those really old-fashioned ones. It’s on little legs. And half the tiles on the bathroom floor were missing. He showed me once that under the tub was a kind of hidden recess in the floor. He used to put all the cash he received in a plastic bag, and then hide it in the recess with a couple of old tiles on top. You’d find it if you were looking hard, but, really, who’d be looking?”

  The tub was in one corner of the house, surrounded by sheets of corrugated iron. I set to, dragging them out and stacking them behind me. I wondered if this was still a crime scene, in which case I was presumably interfering with evidence.

  My face was damp too when I had cleared a path to the tub. Then I had to get down on my knees and push away the layers of ash and soot. “Show me the place,” I said to Miriam.

  “I remember it was near the end,” she said, crouching low and trying to peer underneath. Jonah was watching intently.

  I ran my fingers under the tub and felt a tile move. I pulled it out and then put my hand back under, and—yes!—I could feel some sort of recess or crevice in the ground. I reached in and pulled out the contents.

  “Yes! Yes!” cried Miriam with excitement. Then: “What is it?”

  I looked at the blackened lump of—something—that I was holding. “It’s not money,” I said. “I think it’s a wad of papers. Documents. Or rather, the remains of documents. There’s not much left. And it all seems to have become waterlogged. I guess from the fire-fighters.”

  Miriam and I examined our find. It seemed we had chanced upon a bundle of several dozen documents, all of which had been burned until only the top portion remained, and then had been melded together into a soggy dough by the water from the hoses of the fireys.

  “Give them to me,” said Miriam. Jonah and I watched as she tried to separate some of the papers. At last she spoke: “These seem to be some kind of receipts for buying shares.”

  “Shares? Why on earth was your father buying shares?”

  “I think we need to ask the person who issued these receipts”—she pointed to a barely decipherable name at the top of one of the documents—“Go-Go Greene.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “So he had a share portfolio. An absolutely huge share portfolio. Possibly something like two hundred thousand dollars worth a year. For around twenty years, apparently. Are you sure he was getting that much?”

  We were back at Miriam’s home. Jonah had received permission to resume his battle against the forces of evil, while Miriam and I sat in the kitchen.

  “It was a torrent of money,” she said. “When I was helping him it could be five-figure sums every month. Ten thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars. More sometimes. Each month. He was brilliant at fund raising. That’s mainly what he was doing when he wasn’t in Asia. Traveling around the world. Speaking at churches.”

  “Speaking out on the issues.”

  “Speaking out on the issues. He used to love it when the newspapers phoned and asked for some outrageous comment on gay marriage or women’s lib or whatever. It—you know—rallied the base, or whatever they say in America. There’d be a stream of letters to the editor and comments from public figures—from politicians even—attacking him and making him appear under siege. It was brilliant for fund raising.”

  “So much money. Didn’t he have staff? An office?”

  “He did everything himself. Absolutely everything.”

  “So how did the money arrive? People were sending him cash and checks?”

  “He had lots of regular donors. Probably most of the money came from them. He had a bank account. Everything went in there.”

  “But he must have had a secretary? An accountant?”

  “Not as far as I ever knew. He did it all himself. He didn’t trust anyone. That’s why he wanted me to take it over.”

  “So when you were helping him, when you took a term off your teaching to work with him, you saw where the money went?”

  She thought. “Not really. He did all the banking work himself. I was mainly helping to gather the money, send receipts, help write the monthly newsletter, stuff like that.”

  “So you didn’t
know where the money went?”

  “No, but…look…there was no reason to doubt where it went. It all went to the various orphanages. I just took that for granted. But I didn’t actually deal with money going out. Only money coming in.”

  “You didn’t send checks to orphanages, or transfer money to them?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think so, no.”

  “But then after you left, when you got pregnant...I mean, your father was getting old. Didn’t he get anyone to replace you?”

  “I know he had a friend in Sydney who was helping him. But he was another old guy. A retired pastor, I think. Anyway, I’m sure he died a few years ago. And as far as I know my father didn’t have anyone else.”

  “Obviously because he didn’t want anyone to know where the money was really going. He trusted you. Perhaps he was going to tell you. He knew he wasn’t going to live forever, and that the money would keep arriving. He had to tell someone. You were the only person in the world he could really trust.”

  She shrugged. “Yep. Possibly. It sounds about right.”

  “So what were his plans for when he died? Do you know? He must have made some sort of plan.”

  “I asked him once about all the orphanage money. How is it distributed if he’s sick or dies? He was vague, but implied that it’s all taken care of. And I know that he drew up a will. Not that he owned anything. So I never saw the point of that.”

  “Despite everything you say about his lack of concern for money, it seems he was actually pretty good at managing it. He must have had plans to keep it flowing if he was ill or something. Or if he died. He knew he wasn’t going to live forever, no matter how many push-ups he was doing. And he’d know that it can take months to sort out a will. In any case, he must have made plans for making sure that money kept arriving after he died, and that it kept heading out to wherever it was intended? Wherever that was. I just can’t believe that he didn’t have some sort of planning for that.”